Virtual B-Services Network (VESN) announced its first product: a hosted e-mail service with built-in antivirus protection. The service is available at a per-mailbox monthly fee, with volume discounts available starting at 5,000 mailboxes.
The company says that its data center in Providence, RI, is less than 50 yards from the network access points of such major carriers as Qwest, MetroMedia Fiber Networks, IXC, and NEON (Northeast Fiber Optic Networks), and is also within one mile of Bell Atlantic, MCI, Sprint, and Nortel. The facility has standby power and a battery backup, as well as other standard carrier-class goodies such as fire suppression.
VESN hopes to eventually build a suite of Web services for ISPs. The company says, "VESN prides itself on focusing exclusively on delivering the level of service required to maintain a highly available, always-on and always secure status for your e-mail systems."
Burke Anderson of North Atlantic Internet Inc. (NAII), a mid-sized ISP serving over 500 T-l lines to businesses in the Northeast, said, "this is a value-add, a good customer retention tool for our T-1 customers."
He noted that e-mail, as a product, involves a lot of calls between the customer and the ISP to handle problems such as reassigned employees, forgotten passwords, and vacation autoresponders. "None of these are emergencies," Anderson notes, "but they do take up time, both the customer's time and ours." The VESN product allows customers to check and reassign e-mail addresses and passwords. Anderson said, "both I and my customers appreciate the instant gratification."
VESN also touts a feature that reports delivery problems to both sender and receiver. The company says, "The way that a failed communication is reported is very important in a business environment. VESN's policy is to notify both sides of a communication failure. For example, when a mail user exceeds their file allocation, we send messages to both mail recipient and sender so that the failure to complete a message delivery is understood and can be re-negotiated for future delivery. The goal is to close the communications loop, not leave one side hanging like other products do."
The product is available from the VESN Web site. Pricing starts at $4.50 per mailbox per month suggested retail, with a cheaper wholesale price for ISPs, and volume discounts after the first 5,000 mailboxes.
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